Systems and methods herein generally relate to sophisticated imaging systems, such as multispectral and hyperspectral imaging systems and methods that process such images to produce hyperspectral cubes.
Consumer digital cameras in the megapixel range are commonplace due to the fact that silicon, the semiconductor material of choice for large-scale electronics integration, readily converts photons at visual wavelengths into electrons. On the other hand, imaging outside the visible wavelength range is considerably more expensive.
Multispectral imaging collects and processes electromagnetic information at discrete and somewhat narrow bands of different wavelengths. Hyperspectral processes image narrow spectral bands over a continuous spectral range, and produce the spectra of all pixels in the range. Such imaging is useful for medical/healthcare imaging (e.g., human vitals monitoring), transportation (e.g., occupancy detection and remote vehicular emissions monitoring), to find objects, identify materials, or detect processes. Hyperspectral and multispectral imaging have a wide range of applications including astronomy, mineralogy, surveillance, biomedical imaging, physics, and agriculture. However, such imaging systems are bulky, expensive and relatively slow.